Epson Printers

For some reason writing over 725 blog posts and getting a mild following of readership lets you get invited to personalized marketing sessions with exhibitors at Autodesk University. Now I’m not quite sure how many people actually read this blog, or if it all comes from random Google searches. Regardless I feel compelled to continue on this grand life experience of mine that has gone on for the last seven years. In order to do so coming up with blog posts and inspiration sometimes becomes  hard. Luckily for me Epson has given me a blog post topic. 

The topic is Epson’s new line of printers. With the economy starting to pick up it might be time to upgrade your plotter. Now you might be thinking that you don’t need a new plotter, your older one still prints out the plots. But are you missing out on the new technological advances available in today’s printers? For one there are cost savings in the amount of ink a plotter uses. I have no idea if the ink costs less, but as we’ve seen with the so called renewable energy price is no object when it comes to using less resources. Even if we have to throw out our currently working equipment. Plus the line of plotters are Energy STAR Compliant, so you’ll save energy when plotting. Epson printers also plots up to 110 plots per hour. Unfortunately if you use Civil 3D that feature won’t be much use for you, since Civil 3D only plots out at horrendously slowly due to poor object management during viewport regeneration. Do we really need every single Civil 3D object regenerated when we are plotting a viewport?

Since you’ll have some time on your hands while you wait for civil 3D plots to finish, you can always choose to use the smallest ink refill sizes for the three options of ink cartridges Epson offers. This will provide you something to do while you wait for Civil 3D to finish plotting. If you take the time to explode the Civil 3D objects, making sure the rotation is correct in all viewports, then you might want to utilize the larger 700 ml cartridge. Don’t worry about choosing the size when you purchase the plotter, because Epson has made the cartridges interchangeable, so you can use any size cartridge that is offered.

The plotters print both in black and white and color. I’m not one to get overly excited about print quality, but the prints at Autodesk University Epson had on hand were quite nice.

The whole line of plotters may be found here: http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/jsp/Pro/SeriesSureColorTSeries/Overview.do?BV_UseBVCookie=yes Click on the link, because I think it was the main point of the article, except for my going off the rails for a small portion of the blog post.